


in his image

by evanescent_jasmine



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Coming to Grips With Monsterhood, Ep 184: Like Ants, Episode-Typical Ants, Episode-Typical Suffering, Flavours of Other Fears, Gen, Jordan really took a crash-course in Jon's monster arc huh, Self-Loathing, The Corruption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:33:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27375007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evanescent_jasmine/pseuds/evanescent_jasmine
Summary: Jordan Knows how many ants there are now.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 57





	in his image

Jordan Kennedy Knows the path out of the tunnels now. He knows all the paths, winding twisting delving into the earth for ever and ever and ever, but this one... It taunts him, this path. Shines bright in his mind. This one, the Archivist— _Jon_ , that other one had called him—had crawled out of, cutting through the maze of ants and tunnels with unerring clarity until he broke out of the dirt. 

This one, Jordan had taken as well, once he’d stopped shaking. Pushed by frantic sense he could find the Archivist again, get him to _fix this, to do something._

And after that first gasp of surface air, he had rubbed the dirt and ants from his eyes and looked above and had known himself for nothing, nothing at all, under the searing gaze that _SEES ALL, KNOWS ALL, CONSUMES_ —

And in his scrabbling back on his palms and elbows, staring at the sky, he had felt the earth roil beneath him and known, Known, KNOWN that the tunnels scrabbled to follow. 

The Eye had hollowed him out and the colony tunnels had become his veins. There was, _is_ no escaping them.

So he had crawled back inside where he belonged, and there he is still sat, as far away from that tunnel as he can get. But he remains Aware of it, nonetheless. Just as he remains Aware of the Archivist, can feel him out there, an itch in the back of his mind and tells him that he is part of something even bigger than this endless earth and that the Archivist is his tether. 

Jordan hates him.

Jordan Knows how many ants there are now. It is a number he could not begin to put to words, would grow hoarse if he tried to say it aloud long before he could come close to finishing, a number he still does not fully understand. But he does not need to understand to Know the terror and scale of them, Know the bite and crawl of them, Know the song underneath their buzzing clicking _swarming_ and how the screams fit so well into its melody.

He catches himself humming it sometimes, and when he bites off the song in his throat he can hear the missing space almost louder than anything else. He fills it, for just a moment, with a quiet curse.

Fuck you, Archivist, and fuck your help. 

Jordan hates him, but it is a hate that has lost its teeth, or maybe never had any, or maybe they are too similar.

Because he remembers his dreams. 

He had half-thought the Archivist was just another nightmare at first. The ants were here, so why not him as well? He’d thought it was so weird back then, his subconscious giving him some bloke from the Magnus Institute to save him from a mountain of ants, save him from the worm-lady, still burning as she stepped out of the incinerator. 

How often had he reached out, straining for someone, _anyone_ beyond the ants and hurt. 

Jordan should have remembered what came next. The sense of a butterfly held down about to be pinned, the heart-rabbiting certainty in Jordan’s throat that _him_ , _that,_ that _thing_ with the eyes and eyes and eyes was the reason for this all. 

He should have known. He’d _known_. Why had he reached out? 

Then again, maybe it didn’t matter. 

Jordan Knows the route now, after all, Knows they hadn’t needed to come his way at all. 

_I helped you_ , the Archivist had said, voice low and eyes so dark they were visible even in these tunnels. _I helped you. I owed you._

For the nightmares? He Knows the Archivist felt his terror then. Knows the Archivist feels his terror now too. He hadn’t thought to wonder if the monsters in his nightmares felt bad about it at the time, when the world was still the world, and he’s not sure if that makes anything better. 

_I owed you_.

Or for the ashes, maybe. Jordan remembers that man beside the Archivist—Martin, he Knows—asking for them, remembers them on the Archivist’s desk. And here they are now, both of them, swanning about together at the end of everything.

 _I owed you_.

And Jordan had reached out and, for the first time, the Archivist had reached back. 

And now here he is, remade. Soaking it all in for the Eye. For the Archivist. For...himself. 

Jordan Knows how many people are in these tunnels now. He knows their names and their lives and how this is somehow all of their worst nightmares, each in unique and equally horrible ways.

They taste different, you see. Their terrors. 

That man he’d met, Leto, tastes hot and hollow, like the sucking emptiness of a death sudden and too soon. His veins are the colonies Jordan had once feared he’d be, but here Leto is mourning their emptiness of ants and song. 

Another, Sandra, tastes raw and bright, like a livewire clutched in both roasted hands. Hers is a bone-deep awareness of filth inescapable and a million trillion tiny feet that keep her buried firmly within it.

And Karima, she tastes heavy and cloying, like sticky sweet filling your nose and mouth and eyes and self. She is surrounded by a love so heavy it crushes her beneath, a love that consumes, subsumes, and hers is the terror of not knowing who she might be without it, and not knowing if she wants to know. Or if the decision is hers anymore. Unlike Leto, the ants have not abandoned her. 

And Thomas, and Anjali, and Saoirse, and Howard, each of their lives and terrors flayed open and him just...sat here. 

Because he’s tried to tell the ants to go, just _fuck off_ out of the tunnels entirely. They found new people in their march, already in the suffering earth, waiting. And the tunnels expanded. 

He’s tried to tell the ants to stop, not move, not _hurt_ and the weight of them crushed and stifled all the same. 

He’s tried to tell the ants to all come to him. Felt only right to bury himself. They did. They piled and piled and piled one layer over the other around him, flooding the empty tunnel he chose. And on their backs they brought their charges, to be entombed with him. 

No use, is there. The colony tunnels are his veins and the ants are his every twisted will and the people...he’s their Watcher, isn’t he? 

And he says he hates it, curses in the never-quiet.

But. 

They aren’t hurting him. They come and go as he tells them. So long as it’s within the earth, they move according to his barest thought. That feels good. The anguished wails when they go (Leto can’t bear it, Karima doesn’t know what to do) and the screams when they come back (Patricia had hoped. She shouldn’t have, but she’d _hoped_ ), the differences in pitch and volume and when and how...also feel good. Powerful. Interesting. 

Sick, yeah, of course sick, and he’s _still_ afraid and covered in these fucking ants.

But.

It satisfies what lives in his veins and his Eyes and Above and if he hated it, if he _really did_ , he could have gone back. Could have stopped Knowing. The Archivist had given him that choice.

But no, no, no he couldn’t have. Not when he Knows, now, what’s waiting on the other side. The colony tunnels are his veins and it means he Knows how it would feel if his veins were made into the colony tunnels. The slow march-bite-rend until all of him is consumed and all of him belongs and he can _See_ it happening. To countless somebody else’s in these tunnels. There is no reason he should have been spared, except that in a life that was not his life, the Archivist _owed him_. 

... _Has_ he been spared? 

Is it really better to be hollowed out quickly instead of slowly, only to be filled with everyone else’s hollowness coming together in a wretched roiling satisfaction that feeds the one who made this all?

...Yes. Yes of _course_ it’s better, or he’d have gone back when the Archivist offered. He knows that. Just his own cowardice that stopped him. 

Who would it have helped, though? What difference does one more monster make, a watcher for what’s already there?

When he thinks about his nightmares, he knows the answer is _a lot._

When he thinks about his attempts to help…

The Archivist, reaching out, had lost all of the hunger Jordan remembers from his dreams. In person, he’s just sad and scarred and so, so scared. Jordan hates him and understands him and hates that too.

But he is...thankful is too strong a word. But it’s something in that area anyway.

There’s nothing else in this world. No way the Archivist could have taken his hand and pulled him out and not been the vehicle of something worse. 

Jordan lifts his eyes up to the dirt ceiling and clasps his carapace-crusted hands together like he used to when he prayed. No God waits on the other end, no one except the Eye and its Archivist, but the Archivist made Jordan in his image so he figures that’s close enough.

“I don’t...want to do this. Especially not if it just makes _you_ better. But if I...if I can do that trick to other people…”

Predictably, there is no answer, neither encouraging or otherwise. The Ceaseless Watcher or whatever isn’t much for chatting, and the Archivist...Jordan can’t tell where he is, only that he’s far, and that he’s scared.

So Jordan remains sat there. Watching. He doesn’t want to scare people. But if that will make the Eye up there talk to him, make him...make him able to do that trick, then...he’ll learn.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, many thanks to rustkid for reading my nonsense first drafts.


End file.
